Word: colombia
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...months seven U.S. oil companies have folded their rigs and suspended drilling in Colombia. Last week Shell, having sunk $90 million trying to get profitably established, announced that it was forced to curtail operations. That left only two small outfits drilling for new fields in Colombia. Three big U.S. companies (Socony-Vacuum, Texaco and Jersey Standard's Tropical) have put too much money into old, producing fields to pull out now; but they have virtually given up trying to find new oil for the present...
Reason for suspension was that Colombia had just about succeeded in pricing itself out of the oil business. While Venezuela's tough but sense-making petroleum code fostered a billion-dollar industry, Colombia's confusing, ultra-nationalist oil laws had crippled efforts to develop resources. It often took ten years to get an exploration concession through Colombian courts. After that, the million dollars spent on drilling a new well would be subject to tax whether oil was found or not. Extra-legal riders of one sort or another jacked royalties as high as 25%; the total government take...
...some backwoods areas of Colombia, arguments usually end in a draw-of guns or machetes. During election campaigns, such bloody incidents have been used by politicos to incite violence on a national scale. As their hottest congressional campaign in years moved into high gear last week, sober Colombians were dismayed to see the vicious old cycle repeating itself. In three months, the number of murders attributed to politics had risen to 40. Warned staid El Tiempo: "[Such] violence is the worst thing that can happen in a democratic country...
...Chicago Tribune's Colonel Robert R. McCormick, whose whirlwind trip through Latin America has already been marked by banquets and speeches in half a dozen countries (and by a small fire in his private plane as it flew over Colombia), reached a new high in Argentina. He and his wife were honor guests at a four-hour luncheon at the Buenos Aires country place of Juan Perón. After lunch, Juan gave Bertie a medal, a diploma and a well-phrased pat on the back: "This medal ... is presented to honest men. I award...
...other day TIME-LIFE International, publishers of our overseas editions, received a subscription order from a man who gave his address as Andagoya, Colombia. No such place appeared in the traffic manager's atlases, so he asked the airline that flies TIME to Latin America where Andagoya was. The airline couldn't focate it, but promised to investigate. This is the investigator's report...